Thursday, September 7, 2017

And today, we have two pretty good seedlings with single, glaring flaws. Sort of the same flaw in both cases, in fact.

0900 Tessa Endurance is the first of 0031 Sylvester's offspring to bloom, and it strongly resembles Sylvester: they both have orange / light yellow blooms,

and dark new leaves (though Sylvester's are redder and therefore more unusual).

The huge flaw is that Tessa is apparently just covered with thrips. I mean, I'm not actually seeing them myself, but scars don't lie:

So that's disappointing. The newer growth seems to be doing slightly better, so maybe the seedling will be okay if I give it more time, but this is depressing nevertheless, especially since 0031 Sylvester has been having problems off and on with Xanthomonas and "ghost mites."1 It'd be nice to have a decent orange / white or orange / light yellow.2

Anyway. So Tessa's fate is undetermined for now; I'd like to keep her, but that will be difficult to justify if the thrips keep going after the leaves like they have been.

I'm pretty sure "Tessa Endurance" is one of the names I came up with, so there's no real-life queen to talk about.

1293 Power Infiniti is not as striking-looking, but she's produced a lot of blooms so far, and the white / yellow combination when the spathes first open isn't bad:

Occasionally the spathes are even a very, very, very light pink, though that doesn't always photograph clearly.3

but unlike Bianca, Power Infiniti sometimes then changes again, from white to yellowish-green.

The surprising part, for me, is that the blooms don't always do this. Sometimes they stay white. Maybe the color change only happens if the spadix gets pollinated? Or if it doesn't get pollinated?

In any case. You can see from the scarring on the spathe that Ms. Infiniti also has issues with thrips. I don't know if the thrips are actually worse here, or if they just show up a lot better against the white background, but either way, it's ugly, and I wish it weren't happening. Strangely, the thrips don't seem to bother the foliage at all,

so maybe what I need to do is cross Tessa and Power together and hope their offspring gets the spathe thrips resistance of Tessa and the leaf thrips resistance from Power.4

Power Infiniti is the only seedling from 0271 Wanda Reulthemal to bloom to date; Wanda appears to have passed on her floriferousness, spathe shape, and spathe size, but not her coloration (pink / pink).

The real-life Power Infiniti is a DJ and performance artist, and has been performing since the mid 90s, but I had a difficult time finding much credible information about her beyond that. Her Twitter account is mostly arguing about politics, and there are videos on YouTube but the video quality is so bad they're basically unwatchable. I did find a long, detailed (arguably overly detailed, and with some NSFW language) blog post about Power Infiniti here, though it doesn't spend as much time actually talking about Infiniti specifically as I was hoping for.5 What little there is makes her sound kinda awesome.

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1 My own name for a pest that is clearly a mite of some kind but doesn't look or act like spider mites; I first blogged about them in 2014, but they'd been around for a little while before that. Spraying the foliage with soapy water, then rinsing, mostly takes care of them, but splashing water around can spread the Xanthomonas too, so I try not to do it too often. Which means that the ghost mites never actually leave; I just don't see them for a while.20788 Owen McCord is close, but so far seems undecided about what color it wants its spadix to be. Sometimes they're orange.
Though now that I look at the photos, 0031 Sylvester has done that before as well, so possibly Owen's as close as I'm going to get. 0329 Gladys Panzarov was the right color but is already dead, due to ghost mites and Xanthomonas. 3 The pink is likely genetic influence from 'White Gemini,' Power Infiniti's grandparent, which had white / yellow blooms that were sometimes pink near the base of the spathe, especially as the blooms aged. 4 Easier said than done; I don't think either seedling produces pollen. 5 I mean, it's interesting anyway. It's just so far removed from my personal experience as a gay man in the 90s that I have a tough time understanding and relating to it, and I found the page in the first place because I wanted to know about her, not her milieu.

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